Recently in Performances

It might seem churlish to complain about the BBC Proms coverage of Pierre
Boulez’s 90th anniversary. After all, there are a few performances
dotted around — although some seem rather oddly programmed, as if embarrassed
at the presence of new or newish music. (That could certainly not be claimed in
the present case.)

I recently spent four days in St. Petersburg, timed to coincide with the
annual Stars of the White Nights Festival. Yet the most memorable singing I
heard was neither at the Mariinsky Theater nor any other performance hall. It
was in the small, nearly empty church built for the last Tsar, Nicholas II, at
Tsarskoye Selo.

As I walked up Exhibition Road on my way to the Royal Albert Hall, I passed a busking tuba player whose fairground ditties were enlivened by bursts of flame which shot skyward from the bell of his instrument, to the amusement and bemusement of a rapidly gathering pavement audience.

‘Here, thanks be to God, my opera is praised to the skies and there is nothing in it which does not please greatly.’ So wrote Antonio Vivaldi to Marchese Guido Bentivoglio d’Aragona in Ferrara in 1737.

When he was skilfully negotiating the not inconsiderable complexities,
upheavals and strife of musical and religious life at the English royal court
during the Reformation, Thomas Tallis (c.1505-85) could hardly have imagined
that more than 450 years later people would be queuing round the block for the
opportunity spend their lunch-hour listening to the music that he composed in
service of his God and his monarch.

Two of the important late twentieth century stage directors, Robert Carsen and Peter Sellars, returned to the Aix Festival this summer. Carsen’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a masterpiece, Sellars’ strange Tchaikovsky/Stravinsky double bill is simply bizarre.

Plus an evening by the superb Modigliani Quartet that complimented the brief (55 minutes) a cappella opera for six female voices Svadba (2013) by Serbian composer Ana Sokolovic (b. 1968). She lives in Canada.

With its revelatory production of Rappaccini’s Daughter performed outdoors in the city’s refurbished Botanical Gardens, Des Moines Metro Opera has unlocked the gate to a mysterious, challenging landscape of musical delights.

Even by Shakespeare’s standards A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of his earlier plays, boasts a particularly fantastical plot involving a bunch of aristocrats (the Athenian Court of Theseus), feuding gods and goddesses (Oberon and Titania), ‘Rude Mechanicals’ (Bottom, Quince et al) and assorted faeries and spirits (such as Puck).

What do we call Tristan und Isolde? That may seem a silly question.
Tristan und Isolde, surely, and Tristan for short, although
already we come to the exquisite difficulty, as Tristan and Isolde themselves partly seem (though do they only seem?) to recognise of that celebrated ‘und’.

So this was it, the Pelléas which had apparently repelled critics and other members of the audience on the opening night. Perhaps that had been exaggeration; I avoided reading anything substantive — and still have yet to do so.

La Roche, for
instance, introduces the rival element of the stage — and seems, by the force
of his panegyric alone, to have won everyone over. (Not, of course that that
brief meeting of minds and souls whole; once discussion of the opera
begins, æsthetic and personal bickering resume.) The question of staging
inevitably came to mind, here, of course, given the curious decision to present
Capriccio in concert. Even if, as rumour has it, the decision to
perform Strauss’s last opera was made late in the day, as a consequence of
Renée Fleming having elected not after all to take on the role of Ariadne, it
is difficult to understand why, instead of a desultory couple of concert
performances, a production from elsewhere might not have been brought in. The
Cologne Opera’s excellent, provocative staging, seen
first at the Edinburgh Festival, would have been one candidate; so, by all
accounts, would be Robert Carsen’s Paris production. (That is to leave aside
the question, worthy of Capriccio itself, of why a singer wields such
power at all. Gérard Mortier in Paris had the healthier attitude that if
‘stars’ were willing to perform in and to throw themselves wholeheartedly
into interesting repertoire and stagings, all the better; if not, a house could
and should manage perfectly well without them.)

Anyway, we had what we had — and I missed a full staging far less than I
should ever have expected. Part of that was a matter of a generally strong
musical performance, Ton winning out perhaps, but it seemed also to be
a credit to the acting skills of the singers, who edged the performance
towards, if not the semi-staged, at least the semi-acted. Though most did not
follow Fleming’s lead — she has recently sung her role on stage — in
dispensing with their scores, there was genuine interaction between them and
more than a little moving around the stage in front of the orchestra.
Presumably those credited with ‘stage management’ — Sarah Waling and Fran
Beaumont — had some part in this far from negligible achievement too.
Moreover, Fleming’s Vivienne Westwood gown, granted a lengthy description in
the ‘production credits’, might as well have been intended for a staged
performance.

Fleming’s performance was more mixed than her fans would doubtless admit,
or perhaps even notice. There was a good degree of vocal strain, especially at
the top, accompanied at times by a scooping that should have no place in
Strauss. It would be vain, moreover to claim that there were not too many times
when one could not discern the words. That said, it seemed that there was an
attempt to compensate for (relative) vocal deficiencies by paying greater
attention to the words than one might have expected; there were indeed
occasions when diction was excellent. She clearly felt the agonistic tensions
embodied in the role, and expressed them on stage to generally good effect in a
convincingly ‘acted’ performance. There were flaws in her final soliloquy,
but it moved — just as the Mondscheinmusik did despite an
unfortunate slip by the first horn.

It will come as no surprise that Christian Gerhaher excelled as Olivier.
Both he and Andrew Staples offered winning, ardent assumptions of their roles
as suitors for the affections of the Countess — and of opera itself.
Gerhaher’s way with words, and the alchemy he affects in their marriage with
music, remains an object lesson . His cleanness of tone was matched — no mean
feat — by that of Staples, a more than credible rival. Peter Rose offered a
properly larger than life La Roche, though vocally, especially during his paean
to the theatre, it could become a little threadbare. Bo Skovhus may no longer
lay claim to the vocal refulgence of his youth; he can still hold a stage,
though, even in a concert performance, and offered a reading of the Count’s
role that was both intelligent and dramatically compelling. Tanja Ariane
Baumgartner, whom I have had a few occasions to praise in performances outside
this country, made a splendid Covent Garden debut as Clairon, rich of tone and
both alluring and lively of presence. Graham Clark offered a splendid cameo as
Monsieur Taupe, rendering the prompter’s late arrival genuinely touching.
There was, moreover, strong singing, both in solo and in ensemble, from the
band of servants, many of them Jette Parke Young Artists. John Cunningham’s
Major-Domo faltered somewhat, but he had a good line in the brief declamatory.
The audience clearly fell for Mary Plazas and Barry Banks as the Italian
Singers, though I was not entirely convinced that some of those cheering
understood that they were acknowledging Strauss in parodic mode.

Sir Andrew Davis led an estimable performance from the orchestra, the
occasional fluff notwithstanding. There were moments of stiffness, not least in
the Prelude; transitions were not always as fluid as they might have been.
Davis, however, marshalled his forces well, and pointed up the myriad of
references to other music, whether direct quotation or something more allusive.
For all the perfectly poised nature of the ‘discussion’, we always know
that Strauss (and thus music) will win out, as he did here. The performance was
recorded by BBC Radio 3 for future broadcast: inevitable cavils
notwithstanding, it remains highly recommended.